Kinaesthetic Traces Across Material Forms : Stretching the Screen's Stage

This chapter explores the body screenographies of performer Loie Fuller, the movement mapping by Scientist Etienne Jules Marey, and the art form of cinedance emerging from both. In trajets, the screens and visiting public together alter patterns in the installation space, which affect the screens' direction, velocity and rotation, and the visitors' pathways or movement trajectories. These interactions, which also include projected images collectively, constitute the choreography of the installation. Loie Fuller and French scientist Etienne Jules Marey created techniques that mediated and materialised bodily movement beyond its ephemeral ever-changing nature. Both of them sought to expand the scientific and artistic scope of movement perception and transformation. Marey isolated the body into a controlled environment to capture quantitative shifts of movement over time with 'movement-mapping' techniques. Fuller, on the other hand, created an expressive 'body-screen', which transformed her body and its surrounding space into animalistic and elemental metaphors. They both contributed to what constitutes movement and kinaesthetic knowledge, on by framing, amplifying and converting movement into linear, sequential, two-dimensional representations, and the other by creating performances which transfigure the expressive materiality of bodily movement. The installation trajets uses mutually constitutive processes of bodily movement techniques to map feedback encouraging the visitor to feel movement vs simply looking movement. The screen is not only a projection surface, but also a dynamic participant in the screenography. Cinedance is an art form that extends both what is cinema and what is dance. This art form extends the body-medium of the audience through movement empathy and haptic perception with cinematic techniques of shifts in point of view, referential framing, decor, montage, compositing and so on. The choreographic interaction still depends on the physical participation of the general non-specialised public, but unlike trajets 2000 it no longer uses computer vision to track the movement of visitors in the instrallation. In order to capture more people simultaneously and with more accuracy, the team pursued the design of a pressure-sensing floor. Movement mapping, body screenographies and cinedance principles contribute to the choreographic research. The artistic research also indirectly reflects the microcosm of a larger, technically mediated socio-kinaesthetic condition we experience in daily routines.